"Menachem Kipnis: Yiddish Folklore and Photographs from Interwar Poland showcases photographs of East European Jews alongside Yiddish folk stories documented by Menachem Kipnis (1878-1942), an ethnomusicologist, performer, and folklore collector who died in the Warsaw Ghetto. Kipnis photographs were originally published in the American Yiddish press throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The folk tales, published originally in Yiddish as Chelmer Mayses (Chelm Stories), were published in the East European Yiddish press during those same years. This volume, for the first time in single book, brings together these two bodies of Kipniss work, suggesting new ways of understanding the image, both literary and visual, of East European Jewish culture between the two World Wars. With an introductory essay, annotation, and an epilogue, Menachem Kipnis provides a glimpse into the aspirations for modernization that characterized Jewish life before the Holocaust, both in Europe and in the United States"-- Provided by publisher."Menachem Kipnis (1878-1942) was one of the early 20th-centurys greatest Jewish East European ethnomusicologists, folklorists, and photographers. He had a weekly column in the Warsaw Yiddish newspaper Haynt, retelling humorous old folk stories about the fictional Polish town of Chelm, populated exclusively by fools. At the same time, his photographs of Jewish life in Eastern Europe regularly appeared in the Forverts (Forward), the most popular Yiddish daily newspaper in the United States.

Now, for the first time, Kipniss stories and photographs are published together in a single book.Menachem Kipnis brings these photographs and stories into dialogue with one another, bridging the Jewish communities in Poland and in America during the interwar period. This dialogue, between image and text, between European metropolis and American metropolis, captures a key historical moment when American Jews sought to imagine the lives of their co-religionists in the "Old Country" and East European urban Jews sought to distinguish themselves from their Jewish compatriots who were still living in the "shtetl". Including an introductory essay, annotations, and an epilogue by Sheila E. Jelen, Menachem Kipnis suggests new ways of understanding both visual and literary depictions of East European Jewish culture between the two World Wars"-- Provided by publisher.